Latest revision as of 23:57, 14 October 2018

SteamPipe is Steam's new content distribution system. It changes the way games (including dedicated servers) are downloaded, updated and stored. More information can be found on the Steam Support page.

Server administrators

Instead of a proprietary delivery protocol, SteamPipe uses HTTP, which allows datacenters hosting multiple servers to set up a caching HTTP proxy, necessitating only a single download of an update from Valve's servers.

Game developers

Game developers using SteamPipe can issue updates themselves; the previous system required manual intervention by Valve when an update was to be published.

LAN Caching

As SteamPipe now uses HTTP it allows not only datacenters hosting multiple servers to setup a caching but is also very useful for LAN's. Setting up a caching proxy can significantly reduce the amount of bandwidth required for multiple clients or servers to preform updates.

Developers

The Source SDK Launcher no longer works. Tools for games that used to be in the Source SDK Launcher must now be launched by going to " C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\[game name]\bin " Example: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Half Life 2\bin

Changes

Downloads are performed using HTTP instead of a proprietary protocol.

Data files are no longer placed into GCFs but directly into the file system.

To counteract the performance issues with accessing many tiny files (the reason why GCFs were used in the first place), Source games distributed via SteamPipe store their assets in VPK archives.

Data generated before/during gameplay is no longer stored in user-specific subdirectories of SteamApps; instead, the common subfolder is used.

Dedicated servers are no longer updated using HLDSUpdateTool (known as steam on Linux) but using SteamCMD (a stripped-down version of the full Steam client).